I’ve argued with many newer feminists when debating the notion of self defense. Self defense and resistance as rape prevention are real and effective solutions supported by research[*]. Yet many newer feminists view even the very idea as victim blaming. I think this is a problem within many social movements today. In the interest of maintaining a united front, all nuance and subtlety is ignored!

And it completely ignores the historical significance of self defense in feminism from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

As young girls in the ‘80s, many of us had our first encounters with feminism through self-defense classes we took with our classmates and mothers. At the time, it was one of the most visible aspects of the movement, because the notion that a woman could protect herself, and was not dependent on a man for safety, was entirely subversive. After all, with increased freedom comes increased responsibility—and responsibility is not the same as blame.

New feminists, in my opinion, ignore this at the risk of becoming hypocrites and splintering the movement (all of the freedom, none of the responsibility). There is also an issue of choice at play here. As an autonomous, free-thinking woman, shouldn’t I be able to choose how I wish to respond to my own attack?!

And yet, the issue of rape culture still needs to be addressed. All things being equal, it should only be necessary to talk about the ways women can protect themselves in the rare instance when a crazed and violent perpetrator seeks to assault them.

We live in a society in which rape is ignored, victims are shamed and silenced, and a general climate persists in which otherwise normal young men and women are becoming perpetrators and victims because their view of consent and sexual agency is so incredibly skewed. Young men don’t know what they’re doing is rape, or feel so much pressure they don’t care. And young women don’t know they can say no and are afraid to speak up about assault if they do.

So society itself also needs to be addressed. I guess the full analysis leaves room for both aspects of the discussion.

* Below is some data to back up the assertion that “self defense and resistance as rape prevention are real and effective solutions.” From the National Institute of Justice:

In a 2005 report commissioned by NIJ, researchers examined a variety of sexual assaults and other physical assaults against women. The study did not focus specifically on college students. The researchers found that potential rape victims who resisted their attackers physically and verbally significantly reduced the probability that a rape would be completed and did not significantly increase the risk of serious injury.

Most self-protective actions significantly reduce the risk that a rape will be completed. In particular, certain actions reduce the risk of rape more than 80 percent compared to nonresistance. The most effective actions, according to victims, are attacking or struggling against their attacker, running away, and verbally warning the attacker.

In assaults against women, most self-protective tactics reduced the risk of injury compared to nonresistance. According to the researchers, the only self-protective tactics that appear to increase the risk of injury significantly were those that are ambiguous and not forceful. These included stalling, cooperating and screaming from pain or fear.

A separate study found that even when a rape was completed, women who used some form of resistance had better mental health outcomes than those who did not resist.[1]

A caveat:

Law enforcement officials, however, counsel caution against automatically using violence or other forms of resistance. People who are assaulted are advised to assess the situation and trust their own judgment about the best way to respond.

A UO sociologist finds that women who took a ten-week self-defense training were significantly less likely to experience unwanted sexual contact than those who didn’t. … Jocelyn Hollander [looked] at the outcomes for 117 college students who received this self-defense training versus a control group of 169 students who did not. Of those, seventy-five from the first group and 108 from the second agreed to take part in a follow-up survey or interview.

The results are clear: a much lower percentage of the women who took the self-defense class reported incidents of unwanted sexual contact than the women who did not take the class (see chart).

Something to add to the discussion? Drop us a note. And thanks for all the great ones so far, including the ones that don’t get posted because of space and pacing.

Your reader makes a good point about people who do not realize that what they did was rape—but I also think it’s important for activists to make clear that there’s a distinction between these people and intentional, predatory rapists.

The latter are always going to exist, and they are not going to be swayed by a change in culture. The former are not necessarily callous people, and for them it’s not about power; it is just about sex. Lumping these two groups together as if their crimes are equally heinous is, I think, counterproductive. You’re not going to win over a man who makes bad choices when the line of consent is blurry if you treat him as if he’s holding a knife to the woman’s throat.

I think it necessitates a change in tactics (that “don’t be that guy” campaign your reader mentioned is, I think, a step in the right direction). But more importantly, it necessities a change in rhetoric within the movement.

Another reader raises a further issue, illustrated in the above PSA:

One way to address prevention without blaming victims and survivors is to focus on the potential role of bystanders.

Decades of research on sexual violence has shown that rape often occurs in contexts where we, through our cultural dialogues and habits, are not expecting it—for example, when the perpetrator is known to the victim, or rather than using extreme physical force, the perpetrator uses alcohol/substances/verbal threats. Contrary to being harmless, these rapes affect survivors in so many ways and for potentially long periods of time.

As a community we can use this knowledge to be proactive bystanders, recognizing that situations we assume to be part of the “normal” experience of socializing and sex are often environments with high-risk factors for sexual assault. By being aware of the risks, we can be more vigilant of our friends and those around us, taking on a community-level responsibility for prevention as opposed to an individual-level responsibility.

One pitfall is to assume that prevention means abandoning all environments of risk, when in fact prevention can be maintaining a higher level of awareness and caution in those places (e.g. drinking environments). And we can be less doubtful and more supportive of individuals who come forward to report a rape.

And finally, a word of caution about empowerment. Those who experience sexual assault cruelly and unjustly have their power wrested from them in that moment by a perpetrator. Regaining power is a complicated, crucial, and unique journey, and conversations about empowerment in a context of healing are different than conversations about empowerment in a context of prevention.

The backdrop for this conversation, after all, is a reality where 67 to 80 percent of acts that meet a Justice Department definition of “rape or sexual assault victimizations” are not reported to police. Society and survivors alike have a strong tradition of already placing plenty of power with victims and not with perpetrators. Unfortunately so many conversations about rape are pandering and petty arguments over the use of words, anecdotes, and analogies, when there is enough consistent data and research available for us to ground our conversations in reality and focus on solutions.

Anything important we’ve missed in the discussion so far? Drop us a note.

One of your readers is quoted as writing, “It’s clear to any sane person that a rapist is completely to blame for a rape.” The problem here is that word “blame”—because for most rapes, there are many, many people who think nobody is to blame, because (they think) there was no rape: The person assaulted wanted to have sex, but changed their mind later, or was ashamed, or was just a lying slut with mysterious motives.

Another reader:

This discussion is hard, because some of the answers are incongruously lofty and nuanced relative to the stark evil of rape. But I think it’s too important and the topic needs to be exhausted.

The distinction between the onus for prevention and criminal responsibility is getting muddled: of course the perpetrator is the only person responsible for the crime, and of course, in a specific instance of rape, it is entirely inappropriate to broach prevention at risk of exacerbating the victim’s tendency to feel ashamed. But speaking generally, the major point is that the onus for prevention cannot be placed on the perpetrator, any more than the onus for defeating ISIS can be placed on ISIS. It’s nonsensical. A rapist is not going to heed a listicle of ten ways to avoid sexually assaulting a person, and a PSA on serial killing will never stymie a future Ted Bundy.

Only a decent society and potential victims can take steps to prevent rape. It’s unfair for any responsibility to fall on potential victims, but we live in a world where systemic solutions are slow-moving and imperfect. We have to consider prevention from the individual point of view. Obviously the most controversial subject of prevention is clothing, and I think nothing short of a gender-concealing robot suit would have any effect. But if we care about prevention more than fairness, we should be willing to study the situations around sexual assault and the minds of sexual deviants from every angle, and consider and share every conclusion.

Any final thoughts? Shoot me an email and I’ll post. Update from a reader, who quotes the one above:

[T]he major point is that the onus for prevention cannot be placed on the perpetrator, any more than the onus for defeating ISIS can be placed on ISIS. It’s nonsensical. A rapist is not going to heed a listicle of ten ways to avoid sexually assaulting a person...

I actually think their point about separating responsibility for prevention vs guilt is reasonable, but the argument I quoted is flawed. A big part of the modern anti-rape movement is the realization that many people sincerely do not realize they’re committing rape—for example, with women who are too drunk or otherwise incapacitated to consent.

That’s why you have campaigns like “Don’t be that guy [poster seen above],” which are actually trying to address rape prevention from the male perspective. Their effectiveness seems to be inconclusive so far, but the premise doesn’t seem unreasonable on the face of it.

Anyway, thanks for doing this discussion! It’s an interesting one to have.

I’m not interested in wading into the debate over Chrissie Hynde, but I’ll dip my toe in enough to say that the approach to rape prevention expressed by Katie Russell makes me think of the abstinence-only approach to sex ed. The absolutist approach actually results in more problems (pregnancy and STDs on one side, rape on the other) because proponents refuse to accept the reality of the situation they face (kids like sex / women are vulnerable to rape).

This reader uses an analogy:

A rape and the situation that led to it are two different things. A woman can take some responsibility for what led up to it while laying blame for the rape at the rapist’s feet.

Say you’re driving without a seat belt and someone hits you, ejecting you from the car. If you were belted, you wouldn’t have gotten hurt as bad, or maybe at all. It’s the accident your fault? No, of course not. Could you have foreseen trouble and done something to minimize it beforehand? Absolutely.

That analogy only goes so far, but I think it’s the gist of what people are saying.

Another reader rolls out more analogies:

I have the responsibility of cleaning the snow off of my sidewalk after a blizzard. I am not to blame for it snowing. I have the responsibility for locking my doors and carrying insurance. I am not to blame if I am robbed or my house burns down (unless I set it ablaze myself).

There is a difference between taking responsibility and accepting blame. All people have the responsibility to take reasonable measures to protect themselves, but they are not to blame if they are assaulted or raped. Until people recognize that difference, then there will be tragedies that could have been prevented, if only some people taken precautions.

An excellent and tragic point from this next reader:

I can assure you rape victims rarely feel free of culpability, even when they’ve checked off all the boxes of “things to do or avoid in order to prevent getting raped.” We can speak in generalities about what women should or shouldn’t do, but that by definition puts the onus on the victim versus the perpetrator, which is a difficult argument to hold together.

Sophie has a thought provoking piece on the controversy surrounding Chrissie Hynde—the lead singer of the Pretenders—and her comments regarding a sexual assault she experienced four decades ago. Sophie isolates an interesting irony among Hynde’s critics:

[T]here’s no denying that speaking publicly, as Hynde has done, about how women can be to blame for being sexually assaulted if they’re dressed provocatively is both wrongheaded and extraordinarily damaging to many victims of rape. But Hynde’s choice of words—comparing the outraged responses to her comments to a “lynch mob”—seems to demonstrate that she feels more victimized by the flood of comments and messages and thinkpieces and news hits responding to her story than she does by actually being assaulted in the first place.

Which raises the question: Is attacking Hynde for blaming herself (and yes, by association, blaming others) ultimately productive and worth the cost of revictimizing her? Or is the impulse to shame her and others like her sometimes more about self-gratification than advocacy?

Sophie continues with an incisive indictment of Twitter as a means of expression. Meanwhile, a few readers take on the highly-charged topic of rape prevention:

Chrissie Hynde is refusing to be a helpless victim. There’s a fine line between taking responsibility for what one can take responsibility for, and blaming the victim or letting bad people off the hook … but I believe she is properly walking that line. Chrissie is what a genuinely empowered woman looks like.

Shit happens, for sure. The difference between the empowered person and the victim is that the former refuses to see him/herself as a helpless object. In this instance, Chrissie is deciding to focus on herself and what part she played in the instance, and not merely saying that someone did X to helpless, innocent little her. She is a better, stronger person for her attitude.

And I’m not blaming the rape victim here. I’m applauding how she responded to her rape, by HER deciding to take back some level of control by taking some level responsibility for the obvious mistakes in judgement she made. It’s a hugely self-actualized thing to do.

At UCLA where I work, every year a dean warns young women not to get drunk out of their minds at frat parties or Spring Break, because the stats show that they raise their chances of being raped astronomically. And each year the dean (a female) gets slandered as anti-woman and a rape apologist by the kids who are angry at the fact that humans can be very ugly and that life is unfair.

Another reader has a similar stance on the dangers of college life:

In a perfect world, female students would be able to drink as heavily as they would like with no risk of sexual assault, and no amount of drinking makes them deserve to be raped. In this world, though, alcohol is the most common date rape drug. It shouldn’t be considered impossible to tell students that while a woman incapacitated by drinking is in no way to blame for her rape, she still should be aware that controlling her level of intoxication is a vital part of protecting herself.

Rapists exist and will continue to exist for some time. It’s clear to any sane person that a rapist is completely to blame for a rape. We are right to disagree with the Hyndes of the world when they seek to remove blame from the correct targets and heap it on those who suffer from their actions. But taking that to an extreme—where we ignore realities and withhold advice that could help women—isn’t positive either. We need to find a balance between the two.

All this makes me think of a quote from an article I read recently regarding a rape drug detection device in the form of nail polish that would test drinks for contamination on-the-spot:

“Whilst Undercover Color’s initiative is well meaning, on the whole,” [Katie Russell from Rape Crisis England & Wales] said, “Rape Crisis does not endorse or promote such a product or anything similar. This is for three reasons: it implies that it’s the woman’s fault and assumes responsibility on her behalf, and detracts from the real issues that arise from sexual violence.”

“For us, we work with victims to make them realise that they did nothing wrong,” she added. “Among primary cases, some do ask if they could have done anything to stop it. Products like this suggest otherwise. The emphasis must be placed 100% on the perpetrator.”

That organization isn’t suggesting the devices wouldn’t work for the intended purpose; they are literally saying that they would rather these tools did not exist because they imply even to the slightest degree that a woman might take an active role in protecting herself. They would discourage women from using them—and perhaps allow actual rapes to happen that could have been prevented—in order to protect the sanctity of this idea.

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

The president says the United States immigration system is broken. How could it be fixed?

President Donald Trump says that the U.S. immigration system is broken, and in recent days he has railed against what he says is an “invasion” by Central American migrants making their way to the United States. Along with a regular diet of tweets to that effect, he has accelerated the process begun during the Obama presidency of deporting those in the country illegally; criticized the migration of family members of American citizens; and called for a merit-based system of immigration.

Trump’s support for a policy that attracts skilled workers might run counter to his administration’s actual actions, but it underscores a conundrum that has bedeviled successive presidential administrations: how to fix the country’s immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”

Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

The president says the United States immigration system is broken. How could it be fixed?

President Donald Trump says that the U.S. immigration system is broken, and in recent days he has railed against what he says is an “invasion” by Central American migrants making their way to the United States. Along with a regular diet of tweets to that effect, he has accelerated the process begun during the Obama presidency of deporting those in the country illegally; criticized the migration of family members of American citizens; and called for a merit-based system of immigration.

Trump’s support for a policy that attracts skilled workers might run counter to his administration’s actual actions, but it underscores a conundrum that has bedeviled successive presidential administrations: how to fix the country’s immigration system, with its years-long backlogs and millions of undocumented workers, while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrives in Congress with a bigger megaphone than any other House freshman. How's she going to use it?

QUEENS, N.Y.—“Choosing not to speak,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was telling me one day last month, “is taken and read just as deliberately as choosing to speak.”

Fresh off her upset primary victory over Representative Joe Crowley here, the nation’s most famous congressional candidate was speaking pretty much everywhere this summer—stumping for fellow progressives all over the country, hitting the late-night talk shows, and jousting with her many conservative critics on Twitter.

Last week, Ocasio-Cortez made her Washington debut in similar fashion.

In town for the biannual weeklong orientation session for newly elected members of Congress, the 29-year-old progressive star from the Bronx narrated the experience in Instagram stories to her 642,000 followers, complained about being mistaken for a congressional spouse or intern on Twitter, and called out a conservative journalist who suggested she was dressed too fancily for “a girl who struggles.”